ConsenSys and chip manufacturer, AMD, announced a $20.5 million seed round funding raised through convertible notes for its W3BCLOUD project, a data center venture. The project aims to offer an institutional-grade and enterprise-friendly decentralized cloud computing services. The funding will be used to increase the capacity of GPUs used by W3BCLOUD from the current 6,000 cards to well over 20,000.

The project will be built on the Ethereum network with iterations on other blockchains are also in the project’s plans. The co-founder of W3BCLOUD, Wael Aburida, states the company will spend over 90% of the seed funding amount in a bid to increase the “horsepower” of their computers to provide stable and high-performance cloud services to their customers.

The seed funding round aims at a hard cap of $30 million after a successful round of financing by ConsenSys, AMD, and a group of “unnamed” family offices in the United Arab Emirates.

Speaking on the partnership between AMD and ConsenSys, the co-founder and CEO of W3BCLOUD, Sami Issa, said the former would provide the hardware needed (GPUs) to “optimize the decentralized computing platform” while the latter offers the blockchain skillset to develop software solutions starting with the Ethereum blockchain.

The CEO pointed out the scalability issues and challenges on Ethereum to process vast amounts of data on the cloud computing platform. According to Sami, W3BCLOUD can be integrated and built on any blockchain, but Ethereum is the choice due to its market size.

The company is yet to release a statement on what the extra GPUs will be used for. Still, speculations remain high on possible mining businesses or increasing storage space for their customers. Currently, the data centers are focusing on wider decentralized computing services to branch out from the only blockchain. Issa hinted at the possible creation of new uses for the data centers, including decentralized AI and decentralized virtual reality.

He further said,

“We have access to the best computers and the best blockchain minds, we are going to build the computer infrastructure needed for the attractive use cases for the community.”

Not only will W3BCLOUD build a decentralized cloud computing platform but also assist proof of work blockchains in securing their networks. The company will act as a shield to prevent hackers from carrying out a 51% attack in the early stages of the blockchain. This prevents hackers from double spending and rewriting the confirmed blocks.

Decentralized cloud computing is gaining steam in the crypto field with a number of companies, including RippleNET and Google Cloud, joining the fun.

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